Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

From peasant economy we must now pass to landlord economy. Our task is to
examine, in its main features, the present social-economic system of
landlord economy and to describe the nature of the evolution of this
system in the post-Reform epoch.

I. The Main Features of Corvée Economy

As our starting-point in examining the present system of landlord economy
we must take the system of that economy which prevailed in the epoch of
serfdom. The essence of the economic system of those days was that the
entire land of a given unit of agrarian economy, i.e., of a given estate,
was divided into the lord’s and the peasants’ land; the latter
was distributed in allotments among the peasants, who (receiving other
means of production in addition, as for example, timber, sometimes cattle,
etc.) cultivated it with their own labour and their own implements, and
obtained their livelihood from it. The product of this peasants’
labour constituted the necessary product, to employ the terminology of
theoretical political economy; necessary – for the peasants in providing
them with means of subsistence, and for the landlord in providing him with
hands; in exactly the same way as the product which replaces the variable
part of the value of capital is a necessary product in capitalist
society. The peasants’ surplus labour, on the other hand, consisted
in their cultivation, with the same implements, of the landlord’s
land; the product of that labour went to the landlord. Hence, the surplus
labour was separated then in space from the necessary labour: for the
landlord they cultivated his land, for themselves their allotments; for
the landlord they worked some days of the week and for themselves
others. The peasant’s allotment in this economy served, as it were,
as wages in kind (to express oneself in modern terms), or as a means of
providing the landlord with hands. The peasants’ “own”
farming of their allotments was a condition of the landlord economy, and
its purpose was to “provide” not the peasant with means of
livelihood but the landlord with
hands.[1]

It is this system of economy which we call Corvée [Russ.: barshchina]
economy. Its prevalence obviously presumes the following necessary
conditions: firstly, the predominance of natural economy. The feudal
estate had to constitute a self-sufficing, self-contained entity, in very
slight contact with the outside world. The production of grain by the
landlords for sale, which developed particularly in the latter period of
the existence of serfdom, was already a harbinger of the collapse of the
old regime. Secondly, such an economy required that the direct producer be
allotted the means of production in general, and land in particular;
moreover, that he be tied to the land, since otherwise the landlord was
not assured of hands. Hence, the methods of obtaining the surplus product
under Corvée and under capitalist economy are diametrically opposite: the
former is based on the producer being provided with land, the latter on
the producer being dispossessed of the
land.[2]
Thirdly, a
condition for such a system of economy was the personal dependence of the
peasant on the landlord. If the landlord had not possessed direct power
over the person of the peasant, he could not have compelled a man who had
a plot of land and ran his own farm to work for him. Hence, “other
than economic pressure,” as Marx says in describing this economic
regime, was necessary (and, as has already been indicated above, Marx
assigned it to the category of labour-rent ; Das
Kapital, III, 2,
324).[3] The form and degree of this coercion may be the
most varied, ranging from the peasant’s serf status to his lack of
rights in the social estates. Fourthly, and finally, a condition and a
consequence of the system of economy described was the extremely low and
stagnant condition of technique, for farming was in the hands of small
peasants, crushed by poverty and degraded by personal dependence and by
ignorance.

Notes

[1]
An extremely vivid description of this system of economy is given by
A. Engelhardt in his Letters from the Countryside (St. Petersburg
1885, pp. 556-557). The author quite rightly points out that feudal
economy was a definite, regular and complete system, the director of which
was the landlord, who allotted land to the peasants and assigned them to
various jobs.—Lenin

[2]
In opposing the view of Henry George, who said that the expropriation of
the mass of the population is the great and universal cause of poverty and
oppression, Engels wrote in 1887: “This is not quite correct
historically. . . . In the Middle Ages, it was not the expropriation of
the people from, but on the contrary, their appropriation to the land
which became the source of feudal oppression. The peasant retained his
land, but was attached to it as a serf or villein, and made liable to
tribute to the lord in labour and in produce” (The Condition of
the Working-Class in England in 1844, New York, 1887, Preface,
p. III).[4]—Lenin